Should we make things safe? yes, of course. But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no". It should be made clear that risk exists and it's everyone's own personal responsibility to take that into account when doing something. And if I happen to be the unlucky guy for whom the risk realizes, then well, guess life sucks for me. Let's move on. That shouldn't stop everyone else from having fun.
There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year -- I knew someone who was killed, and I've had a couple close shaves. In fact, today I was kiting and witnessed a kiter get rescued by the Coast Guard. It's understandable that society would want to have some say due to the externalities (loss of productive members of society, cost of rescues, risk to bystanders, etc).
IMO it's not the case that 'no risk is acceptable' -- it's just that the risk tolerance for various things seems really arbitrary & out of proportion to reward. For instance, if we didn't accept any risks as a society, we'd ban alcohol & tobacco along with kitesurfing, skydiving and motorcycles, but we don't.
Had a friend who started a social network website at his parents house. Pushing 20 million monthly users. Death threats, competition uploading illegal content and then reporting it, whistleblowers and more threats, people having beef and looking for arbitration, more threats for getting banned etc. He become extremely stressed, stopped going out, paranoia kicked in and then suicide attempts. His friends helped him close the site and he "recovered".
But lesson here is - if you don't have a deep wallet, right mindset and access to therapist, don't start a website today or keep it small and off the main internet.
Assuming the 74 million are really getting lots of value from it, compensating the victims of the catastrophic event is more than worth it. Holding the host liable for the harms, and trusting the host to charge an appropriate amount warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do this.
Imagine a store owner downtown adding a flowerbed and a couple benches at the front of their property. If someone gets hurt via rare catastrophic event, it seems bad to make the owner pay, and even worse to suggest they're supposed to be charging bench users 20 cents each to fund payouts like this.
A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn’t free in a way that makes that really true, and even if the service was free, if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
You didn't directly address my bench scenario, but this sounds like it fits the bench scenario. I don't see anything you've said that would make it an exception. But I think the logical outcome of that is ridiculous.
Sometimes there are bad things that can happen in a place, and that place should not have to pay damages.
And providing value, as an argument to keep existing, should not mean you have to monetize that value. (or drastically increase monetization)
> There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451
I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities.
IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.
The store owner might also be required by the city and/or landlord to update their insurance policy to cover the extended liability.
But, in general, your proposed scenario never specified what the catastrophic event is and why the store owner would be held liable.
Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye. According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury?
Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
That's not generally true, nor should it be.
A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups.
So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
No the mall isn't a good analogy, it has lights, mall cops, CCTV cameras, crowds of people wandering around, it's a well known public place and it's generally not known as a place to approach strangers unless you're selling something. Omegle happened one-to-one, private, and encouraged chatting directly to strangers.
There is a concept, I forget the name of it (not the bystander effect) where if you are in a strange place in public and need help then you can call out to the bystanders for help, or you can point to one specific bystander and ask for help. Say you are a tipsy woman lost her bag, and you call out to anyone for help then the self-interested predator can step forwards, but if you point to one person and ask them to call you a cab then you are unlikely to randomly pick the self-interested predator. So even though most people who try to help a stranger in need are good people, calling out to the void leaves a big opportunity for any bad people to take advantage of. Both can be true - that most people are good and that one arrangement leaves more room for any predators who are present than another arrangement does. Omegle had a reputation for being risqué - like DickRoulette (ChatRoulette), so that means people wouldn't tend to use it in a library, or on a family PC in the living room with other people around.
So people going on Omegle would be more likely younger because they have more free time and less money to spend on things and less ability / money to go out instead, are more likely to go on behind closed doors to avoid people seeing anything rude on their screens, then they'd get matched with a stranger, encouraged to chat with the stranger, and of course the reasonable adults matched with a young child who shouldn't be there would move on, leaving the effect above and the predators room be the ones who pretended to be friendly, and none of the protections of a crowd at a mall - well-meaning strangers ("it takes a village") could see something odd happening and interrupt or check-in.
It's not that everyone on the site was in that situation, it's that the site design and social status left that to happen way way more often than a mall or a shop bench would.
If you think that victims of a "catastrophic event" need compensation, why not propose to institute a mandatory insurance for people using the Internet, like many countries do for cars ? (I am assuming here that the website is not actively trying to help crime, but this doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
Its really not; user fees in the form of driver's license fees, vehicle license fees (both of which tend to be legally required for operation on public roads in most US jurisdictions), federal and state gasoline taxes, etc., are used to pay for use of public roads, as well as general fund taxes which are directed to roads (making even the indirect use of roads by ordering goods, etc., not really free.)
Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.
Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the road, true.
They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a general legal requirement for using public roads, though you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage.
Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free with the idea that “well, a bunch of people will be damaged, but there is no need to assure that those damages are reasonably covered because other people will benefit”, it has lots of costs associated with use, and a number of them (both the licensing regime and the insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the expense of potential beneficial use and assuring compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes, its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary for a service that has benefits for most users and acute harms for some.
The fundamental question is what is the legal objective here, and what do we want it to be?
1) Is the goal to make sure that victims are compensated?
2) Do we think companies like omegle are negligent, and are we trying to hold them accountable?
3) Do we actually think neither?
If the answer is 1 but not 2, then making Omegles pay is clearly an injustice, and we should be looking into some sort of mandatory user insurance.
Putting my cards on the table, I am in camp 3. Just because bad things happen, doesnt mean can or should find a way to compensate the injured party.
Yet EV's still have to pass insane standards because 1/10th, 1/100th of deaths would be too much... it's all about our monkey brain's perception, negativity bias (i.e. 100x good thing equals 1x bad thing) and emotions. We are tied to these things until we leave our carbon meat suits.
And saying, "oh, but people are bad at analyzing risk" or "some people are too stupid to understand". Well, so what?
Building a world where everyone is wrapped in a soft foam and nothing can be done because there is always some element of risk, is a terrible idea.
"You can get killed walking your doggie" - Heat (1993)